PhD, Computer Science and Applications

About Me

I graduated the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2013 with a PhD in Computer Science and Applications. For the whole five years spent there, I was fortunate to work under the doctoral coordination of Dr. Adrian Sandu with the "Computational Science Labs" (or CSL) research group. As a doctoral student, my time was devoted to research (most of it), attending courses, doing homework and, of course, lots and lots of study. It happened that I did all this within the great community there, a fact that made my Grad School experience more enjoyable.

Exploring the research interests of the CSL group, I picked up on a computational science application called .data assimilation., used to improve numerical simulations by reconciling them with real measurements. It can best be described as a computational process which aims to find the right balance between simulations or observations. When applied to large systems, such as the atmosphere, the computation becomes so intensive that high-performance computing resources are mandatory. Precisely, my research efforts focused on the topic of "Observation Impact" and yielded the development of a novel computational methodology which can quantify the impact of each individual measurement, via the sensitivity analysis of data assimilation. This new capability enables the solution of practical applications such as pruning redundant observational data, detecting faulty sensors and designing optimal measurement networks. In order for the whole framework to be feasible in practice, I addressed its efficiency in terms of numerical algorithms, parallelism, preconditioning, multigrid and reduced-order modeling. It was a great opportunity to strengthen my skills in various scientific areas by learning and doing, and to generate exciting research results.

Currently, I hold a position at Lumina University of South-East Europe, an international university in Bucharest (Romania). I am available for research collaborations, advising and contacts, if it proves I can help. Please visit the rest of the sections of this webpage for more info.